Adam Lanza & American Exceptionalism

Some suggest that the US has more mass shootings than other high gun-ownership societies because American culture is much looser, and American society much less closely knit. It’s harder to fall through the cracks as a misfit in other countries. But it’s also the case that it’s harder to rise to the heights than in America.

I suspect that, perhaps in ways that are almost too awful to contemplate, these kinds of spree shooting are the dark side of the limitless American capacity for reinvention. The same culture that has helped permit or foster the most dizzying, varied, awe-inducing society the west presently knows is the same culture that incubates these horrors. Self-realisation is part of the American essence. Sometimes that has a terrible side too. (I think you could make some comparable points about the American religious experience too: this too often seems antiquated to european types but it is real and equally diverse.)

If, as seems likely, these kinds of shooting spree have become more common in recent years this too may be a feature of a culture in which the divides between those who conspicuously have and those who palpably have not have rarely been quite as great or, worse, made so apparent to those who do not have. Modern media – and technology – are part of this though not, of course, all of it.

Because what strikes the foreigner most about the United States is its variety. Indeed variance may be its most significant quality. This owes something to it being a country of 300 million people but I fancy a country of 300 million Swedes (even if spread across a comparably sized landmass) would be a very different place indeed. This, coupled with the American predilection for individualism, has helped make the United States a country of magnificent wonders and jaw-dropping failures. Its highs are very high and its lows exceptionally low. This, if you like, is a feature, cause and consequence of American exceptionalism. Perhaps.

Massie talks in his column about how, like it or not, Americans subdued the frontier with their guns. They are an inextricable part of who we were, and thus who we are. A couple of years ago, when I was reading Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne’s stunning book about the last of the Comanches, I kept marveling at how dangerous life on the frontier was for settlers, even as late as the early 20th century. Indian raids were real, and incredibly bloody and violent — and that’s to say nothing of lawlessness among the settlers themselves. When this book came out, I was living in Philadelphia, and I sincerely regretted not taking the time when I lived in Texas to go see some of these places where the settler forces and the Comanches clashed.

Again, the most remarkable thing was how recent all this was. Quanah Parker, the great Comanche chief who finally surrendered to the whites, did so in 1875. He moved with his people to a reservation, and before he died in 1911, had been a hunting partner of Theodore Roosevelt’s. Guns made all the difference in the defeat of the Comanches, and whatever you might say about the wars between European settlers and Native Americans, had you lived on the frontier in the 19th century, having a gun may have made the difference between your family living and dying, or perhaps your little girl being carried off in an Indian raid, and raised as a Comanche (as was Quanah Parker’s mother). Indeed, Gwynne writes that Cynthia Parker’s grandfather was castrated and mutilated by raiding Comanches as her grandmother was forced to watch. These atrocities were common. As Gwynne writes, “The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward: All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Some were killed, some were tortured.”

Guns were absolutely critical to the survival of European settler civilization. It is unreasonable to think that this almost primal bond with the gun would pass so quickly, so cleanly, and so hastily out of the American psyche. Massie is right: We are exceptional this way.

Before responding take a look at my message to Rod on the methodology of the analysis.

I am not disputing that these semiautos are fun to shoot. I’ve shot fully autos and agree it is a rush. But I don’t think that feeling can responsibly out-balances the demonstrated association of these guns to random, mass death.

I do not like the idea of banning anything. It is not my instinct. But we need to look at the clear bloody evidence. If we don’t like the proposed solutions to a problem, denying the problem exists should not be the next response; instead, we need to come up with better collaborative solutions.

Not so sure that Lanza, Loughner, Holmes, et al are the dark side of some glorious American exceptionalism. They seem to be more the anti-social byproduct of a post-modern anti-culture.

In a traditional society where extended family and communitarianism are the way of life, young males don’t easily fall through the cracks. There are too many relations nearby to catch them. Plus all that socializing helps to keep young male anger in check. And furthermore, they tend to act out anger collectively, or socially – instead of anti-socially.

In Comancheria, for example, these young men would have belonged. They would have known every member of the extended tribe and everyone would have known them. They might still have been introverted, but they wouldn’t have been raging loners.

On summer nights when the moon was full, they would have gone out raiding with the boys, whooping and hollering — scalping, impaling, castrating, raping, torturing and such like activities together with the whole tight-knit community.

They most certainly wouldn’t have committed senseless acts of violence. Tribal people live by a code. The violence they commit is purposeful.

The Comanches were natural men, Rousseau’s man in the pre-social-contract state, an anachronism from the Stone Age surviving right up to the cusp of the Atomic Age and the Space Age.

Not even 100 years after the Comanches were tamed, the people who succeeded them detonated the first atomic bomb on the western edge of Comancheria, and commanded man’s first trip to the moon from its eastern edge – their old raiding grounds! In a sense, these two awesome achievements honor them — these people who committed their massacres by the light of the moon.

The Comanches were an uncivilized — yet highly socialized — people. They must have been quite humane, too. How else could Cynthia Ann Parker have become so attached to her mother and father’s scalpers?

If only Lanza, Loughner and Holmes had been kidnapped into such a world of male-bonding and close-knit community.

Rod, if you ever get the chance to go to Comancheria there’s not much to see, but there is so much to imagine there about the exceptionalism of the Empire of the Summer Moon.

And the land does have a serenely savage beauty to it — especially when there’s a Comanche Moon.

jon s This is typical junk science by people who want to find something. It makes as much sense as your original claim the having more gun deaths than car deaths was in any way related to gun control. These “scientists” from the Atlantic make similar bogus claims. When you look at states which have as few as 600,000 people in them and compare them to states like California with 33 million, these comparisons are ridiculous – especially when the large number of people in Nothern Califonia make California look better than it would if California was only Los Angeles County.

In those small states only one or two gun deaths makes the whole state look bad. In addition, some of those deaths in rural areas could be suicides or hunting accidents, which are not significant problems that need to be fixed. I would rather somebody committing suicide do it less messy, but who cares how he does it, taking the gun away won’t stop it.